This invention relates to medical equipment mounting apparatus and, more particularly, to apparatus for mounting medical equipment to a hospital bed or the like.
It is common practice to mount an IV bag and other like equipment to hooks or arms at the ends of long upright poles to elevate them above the patient for gravity flow purposes. Accordingly, many hospital beds today provide what are referred to as IV pole sockets or mounting holes as an integral part of the bed frames or which are otherwise mounted to the bed frames. Often, there are as many as four of these IV pole mounting holes located at each corner of the bed. Most of these IV pole mounting holes have an internal diameter of approximately 0.5 inch; however, others are known to be as large as 0.75 inch. Accordingly, no single pole can be used universally with all standard IV pole mounting holes.
While these IV pole mounting holes located at the four corners of the bed are suitably located for hanging blood bags and the like which must be located above the patient, they are less suitable for equipment that needs to be mounted at or beneath the level of the patient, such as a urinary collection bag of a catherization kit or automated urinary output monitoring equipment from which a collection bag is supported. Further, the catherization site is normally intermediate the ends of the bed. Accordingly, simple pole mounting of the collection bag and automated urinary output monitoring equipment, at any of the four corners of the bed, does not enable location of the urinary output collection bag directly opposite the catherization site.